By These Wounds

  There’s a meme going around Facebook. It comes from a series of tweets. First, the meme started with “We interrupt this coverage of a police officer’s trial for the killing of a black man to give you news of a traffic stop shooting of a young black man by police.” Then, this meme was adapted to “We interrupt this coverage of a a traffic stop shooting of a young black man by police that interrupted the coverage of a police officer’s trial for the killing of a black man to give you news of the coverage of the shooting of a 13 year old boy of color who was shot by police.” And then the meme was changed to say, “We interrupt this coverage of the police shooting of a 13 year old boy of color that interrupted coverage of a traffic stop shooting of a 20 year old black man that interrupted coverage of the police officer trial for the killing of George Floyd for news of eight people killed in a FedEx facility in Indianapolis.” And I am just done. 

I am done, and I’ve never even been a victim of gun violence, I’ve never known anyone who has been a victim of gun violence, I don’t have to worry when my boys play with their nerf guns in the front yard, and all I have to do is tell them the stories about it and try to explain racism to them at the dinner table while they eat their buttered noodles and chicken nuggets. 

And they sigh as I tell them yet another story of an African American who has died at the hands of ones who are sworn to protect them. They say, “Ugh, mom. Not again. Didn’t we have this talk just a couple of months ago?” And I am just done. I am done. And it doesn’t have any real direct, immediate impact on my life. I am done, and the only thing I can think to do is write another sermon about it, and I know it’s totally not enough, but I’m so done with having to do even that. 

Can you imagine, for just a second, the done-ness of those whose lives have been directly impacted by this violence? Can you imagine the frustration and the heartache and the despair and the absolute anger of those who live in fear, everyday, that they or their children will die at the hands of a gun, maybe even at the hands of a police officer with a gun?

An African-American father posted his thought process about how he has to plan his day with these concerns as a very real reality. He lists all the things he has to do in a day, followed by the names of people who have died doing those exact same things. He says, ”I need to drive my two-year-old to daycare tomorrow morning. To ensure we arrive alive, we won't take public transit (Oscar Grant). I removed all air fresheners from the vehicle and double-checked my registration status (Daunte Wright), and ensured my license plates were visible (Lt. Caron Nazario). I will be careful to follow all traffic rules (Philando Castille), signal every turn (Sandra Bland), keep the radio volume low (Jordan Davis), and won't stop at a fast food chain for a meal (Rayshard Brooks). I'm too afraid to pray (Rev. Clementa C. Pickney) so I just hope the car won't break down (Corey Jones). When my wife picks him up at the end of the day, I'll remind her not to dance (Elijah McClain), stop to play in a park (Tamir Rice), patronize the local convenience store for snacks (Trayvon Martin), or walk around the neighborhood (Mike Brown). Once they are home, we won't stand in our backyard (Stephon Clark), eat ice cream on the couch (Botham Jean), or play any video games (Atatiana Jefferson). After my wife and I tuck him into bed around 7:30pm, neither of us will leave the house to go to Walmart (John Crawford) or to the gym (Tshyrand Oates) or on a jog (Ahmaud Arbery). We won't even walk to see the birds (Christian Cooper). We'll just sit and try not to breathe (George Floyd) and not to sleep (Breonna Taylor).” 

These are things white people simply do not have to think about, these are things that I simply don’t have to think about. 

And yet. And still. I’m done. If it were my child gunned down by police, if it were my father held to the ground with a knee to his neck, if I were my son pulled over and then subsequently killed because he was scared and he panicked, I would absolutely want to burn it all down. I would want to break the windows and loot the stores and shout in the streets. Calm dialogue hasn’t worked. Asking for justice is simply ignored. Demanding that the system fix its own broken system is not only illogical and laughable, but about as effective as banging your head against a wall. No wonder folks are fed up. 

I’m amazed that the streets of Chicago are burning as we speak.

How do we come back from this? Are we, as a society, lost forever? Are we destined to keep repeating history over and over and over again until we finally destroy ourselves? I’m seeing a lot of crucifixions. But not a lot of resurrections. 

I have no answers today. All I have to offer today is this story of Jesus who comes back.  And I think that if we really look closely at how Jesus comes back, we’ll find some hints about how we can move forward. 

We need these fifty days of Easter, we need these stories of Jesus’s resurrection and the subsequent disciples’ disbelief, we need to soak them in, we need to savor them and sit with them and tell and retell them because they show us what resurrection really looks like. And, you know, we could really use a little bit of hope right about now.

Often, I think, we think of resurrection or salvation as this happily ever after story. The prince wakes the princess with a kiss and he puts her on his horse and they ride off into the sunset. We think of resurrection and we think that the bad guy finally gets what’s coming to him and everything gets fixed and it all goes back to the way it was before. We tend to think that it’s just like rewinding the tape and coming up with a different outcome, one where loved ones are returned to us and the storm never comes and everything is finally made perfect. 

But that’s not the resurrection story we get. 

Jesus comes back to us, not in a shining, polished suit of armor, not with the devil in a cage, or with all the isms and phobias and stereotypes of our world defeated, but in the form of a man, a man who still hungers, a man who is still a little bruised up, a man with holes in his hands and a big gash in his side. 

If we believe that Jesus came back to us again, if we believe in the resurrection, if we trust in the miracle that happened on that third day, we must ask ourselves, “If Jesus can be resurrected from the dead, why isn’t he also, you know, healed? Why can’t they fix him up a little? Polish him up? Make him clean and shiny?" Why not close up those wounds, stitch up his side, and fill his stomach and maybe even correct his astigmatism while they're at it? 

Why does Jesus still carry the scars of his death after the miracle of his resurrection?” 

And my hunch is that it’s because that’s just not how real resurrection works. 

When something bad happens, it happens, it’s done, it cannot be undone. Jesus was still beat up and mocked. The disciples still ran away. Jesus was still nailed to a cross and killed by the powers of Rome. Jesus will always carry that with him. Those scars won’t rub out. Those wounds won’t just disappear. The trauma is still there. Jesus will forever walk with a limp, maybe literally, but definitely emotionally. When something bad happens, it’s still always bad, even if there is a resurrection. 

The mistakes we made are still mistakes. The hurt still hurts. Jesus is still beat up and broken and he still has hunger. He’s still human with all the baggage and pain and trauma that comes with it. Those hurtful stories of his past don’t just disappear. 

But maybe that’s exactly how the resurrection works. “By his wounds we are healed,” not because God needed a punching bag in order to somehow get out “his” anger for our disobedience, not because through some slight of hand we are replaced with Jesus at the end if the executioner’s rope, it doesn’t mean that we go back in time to change the past like some billion dollar budget Marvel movie or a ride in a DeLorean with a retrofitted flux capacitor, it means that we can take those scars and those wounds and those limps and those heartaches and we can understand them and interpret them a little differently, maybe even in a way that brings more life than we originally thought possible. Jesus comes to us, still broken, still wounded, still hungry, and that tells us that we don’t need to be fixed or to be changed or to forget our heartbreak, we simply need to be held, to be fed, to be seen and to be loved and known even as we carry all that evidence that we’ve been beat up and broken along with us. 

Honestly, on the day that I die, when I’m coming to Jesus just as I am, with all my wrinkles and bruises and scars and mistakes and plaque-filled arteries, and having him embrace me in his arms and hold me and know me and see me and be with me, both of us, together, with our battle wounds out for all to see, I would rather be received, be resurrected into that, be transformed into that kind of newness, than to be given wings and a white robe and a harp and to float up on some cloud for the rest of eternity. I want to still be me. And that means all of me, my brokenness included. Resurrection means that Jesus comes to us, still wounded, just like we are, but not defeated. Jesus comes to us, still broken, but with a reinterpretation and a reorientation and a new realization of who he truly is. 

Jesus opens our minds to understand the scriptures, to understand the stories - some really, really horrible stories - that have been a part of our lives, a part of our histories. God is wounded. God stays wounded. And God is re-wounded every time one of God’s beloveds suffers as God has suffered. And God is resurrected. God stays resurrected. God is re-resurrected, every time one of God’s beloveds finds hope in their story, every time they gain a better understanding of what they’ve gone through, every time their sins are remembered but forgiven, every time we find new meaning and new understanding and new hope in our once heartbreaking stories. There’s no going back and fixing it. But there is going forward with new understanding, new experiences of peace, new hope for the nations. 

There’s no magic wand to wave that will bring all these dead boys and men and women of color back to us. They are gone. We, as a society, will carry those wounds with us forever. We should feel those wounds as deeply as we are able, because that is how any of this with be resurrected. By his wounds we are healed.

Maybe the parents will be reunited with their kids, and wives will be reunited with their husbands, and everything wrong will be made right again. But until then, we’ve got to mourn and get angry and do whatever we can to keep it from happening to one more boy or one more man or one more woman. And that means we need to really feel what’s been lost. We need to put our fingers in the holes in Christ’s hands and our hands in the gash in his side. That means we've got to feel it, really feel it, every time someone loses their life because of an unjust system. Because every time one of these little ones is lost, Jesus is pierced, again and again. Until we see the woundedness that this causes to Christ - and therefore, to us - none of this is ever going to change.

And. We have to look for the resurrection that is going on today, right now, in our very midst, even as we carry the pain and the wounds of own own sin. There is still resurrection. There is still new meaning and new hope that can be found.  We can do both. We can touch Jesus’s wounds. And we can say, “My Lord and my God.” We can put our hands in his side, we can be reminded of the horrors of that day, and we can speak to him, feed him, listen to his words. We can have joy along with our disbelief and our wondering. 

We can carry the death of Christ in us so that the life of Christ may be made known, may be revealed, may be resurrected right here, right now, right in our midst.

We can demand justice out of the agony of our hearts. We can be done with it all. And we can wait and work towards and expect the resurrection.

Thanks be to God.